Books by Arturo Longoria

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

TEXAS BULL NETTLE (MALA MUJER) EDIBLE TAP ROOT AND SEEDS

It’s a quaint looking plant covered with fuzzy hairs and in the
springtime the stems are dotted with dainty white flowers. It grows from a foot high to four feet high,
dark green, each plant isolated from the next.
Oh yes, one more thing: This evil woman, as it’s called in Spanish, will
put you down. It will turn your skin
into a burning landscape. If you get a
big enough dose you may have to seek medical attention. One fellow who lives not far from here walked
through the brush wearing shorts (a bad idea) and he accidently brushed against
a mala mujer. He was taken to a hospital emergency room for
observation and treatment. But as amazing as this may sound, there are parts
of the plant that are edible. I just
wonder who, centuries ago, was brave enough to pick the seed clusters off the
plant, strip them of their stinging hairs and then taste them. Perhaps he was out on the Sand Sheet, dying
of hunger, and so he was left no choice but to give it a try. Perhaps he took a bite and decided they’d be
better roasted. Or maybe he took a
sack-full of seeds back to camp and his wife said, “Let’s roast them and see if
that improves the taste.” Regardless,
the Native Americans who roamed this land and whose progeny makes up the
majority of those living on it today did not let any edible plant go unnoticed. In fact, they even dug out the tap root (no
easy task with stick tools) and extracted the swollen tuber and ate
it. Now having just witnessed someone
dig out a mala mujer’s tuber and then
attempt to roast it over an open fire, I can attest to the fact that it’s not an
easy task nor is it a meal worth digging three feet down to enjoy. Fibrous and dull, it makes for a lot of
mindless chewing and difficult swallowing.
Nonetheless, the tuber was eaten, or at least that’s what various
sources claim, and the seeds were roasted and consumed.

Just look at the size of that tuber. The young man holding it in the following photo, who is the baby of
the family and who now stands six feet-two inches tall took about forty minutes
to excavate the giant “potato.” It
weighed about twenty pounds. I’ve never
seen a Texas Bull Nettle tuber this size but I imagine there are many others
among the hundreds of mala mujeres growing
in the area.

That plant was not all that large, maybe about two feet high. It had, however, been pruned several times. I should've mentioned that pruning or whacking the plant off at the base with a machete doesn't do any good. In a week the plant has already begun growing another stem. The only way to kill the plant is to remove the tap root. Actually, the nopalitos came and went about a month ago. All the pads are quite large now. I think we're in for an early summer. The mesquite have already started making their beans.